Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
in the 2016 National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test.
This Year 5 student will be referred to as Angela in the report and the value of
NAPLAN assessment data for assessing her writing achievement will be critiqued.
Two areas of concerns will be identified from the assessment data in order to
recommend activities and formative assessment strategies that will help her improve
that she has mastered the writing skills required to achieve a Band 4 and is working
towards mastering skills expected of students that have attained a Band 5. Not only
has she scored below the school average of a high Band 6 but also lower than the
national average, which is a high Band 5. Angela is within the range of achievement
for the middle 60% of Australian Year 5 students, which ranged from a high Band 4
to a high Band 6.
The NAPLAN writing test scores highlight Angelas ability to write a narrative that
further engaged and influenced an audience through the use of narrative devices.
resolution would have created a sense of surprise suspension for the reader.
Angelas ideas were coherent but not concise enough to suggest an underlying
theme. This may have been a consequence of her limited vocabulary, which
consisted of single words and simple figurative language and groups. Similarly, her
characterisation and setting descriptions were either brief or non-existent and her
lack of detail regarding feelings, actions, atmosphere, and place contributed to her
scores. Angela has used referring words, simple conjunctions and connectives. She
experience and understanding. This EAL/D student has not organised her writing
into paragraphs, which makes it difficult to read and identify main ideas. Angelas
simple and compound sentences were predominately correct while only some
complex sentences were correct. Additionally, only some sentences were accurately
punctuated and some nouns were capitalised. With a variety of sentence beginnings,
structure, lengths, capitalisation and punctuation, she would have been able to
express clear meaning. The student was able to spell most simple and common
words and is working towards spelling them all correctly, aswell as correctly spelling
Australian students have reached key educational and academic goals. The test
(SAE), so while the assessment data may have diagnostic value, standardised
18011483 Violeta Zivanovic
testing is not completely effective in assessing the EAL/D students writing skills
academic progress from the time of the test to the time results are released. In
saying this, it may be difficult to do so, as the questions from the NAPLAN writing
test and from the classroom will vary. What it can help with, however, is to monitor
the students progress in order to introduce and offer pathways into the mainstream
curriculum (Hammond, 2012). Conversely, this may be challenging since the test
results are released just under half a year after the test date. This would make it
difficult for me, as Angelas current teacher, to use the assessment data to help
guide my lesson and curriculum planning, as this students writing skills will most
certainly change over this time period (Creagh, 2014). It has also been argued that
NAPLAN can help monitor and find patterns in the EAL/D students writing skills over
over time, as the types of questions and syllabus areas will be different. It is clear
that while the NAPLAN assessment data can be useful, the limitations heavily
The de-contextualised nature of the NAPLAN writing test disadvantages the EAL/D
student and does not provide an accurate assessment of her narrative writing skills.
The test requires Angela to make contextual, cultural and linguistic assumptions,
despite of her inability to do so and this contributes to the gaps between her and
students whose first language is SAE (Laguardia & Goldman, 2007; Nicholas, 2015).
Drawing in this, it can be argued that the writing test fails to target the knowledge
18011483 Violeta Zivanovic
and skills that are expected of an EAL/D learner, irrespective of age. The test is
highly structured and rather than social language skills, it requires students to
posses a significant depth of language (Spinelli, 2008). This has the potential to
her intelligence. It has been found that EAL/D learners find standardised
assessments difficult to succeed in, with one reason being not their inability to
understand the question, but the lack of language skills to answer it successfully
(Laguardia & Goldman, 2007). This suggests that the writing assessment data is
the student may have scored much higher if they completed the same writing test in
area of concern that needs further development in order for her to improve her
narrative writing skills. I will refer to the continuum mode to recommend an activity to
assist this EAL/D student in developing a familiarity with narrative text structure
(Hertzberg (2012).
I would begin by reminding students about narrative text structure and ask them to
mentally try to recognise each component while I read aloud, Where the Wild Things
Are (Sendak, 1963). Afterwards, the students and I would collaboratively identify and
discuss the characters and setting, orientation, complication and conclusion in the
text. I will give students a short narrative with the text structure components mixed
up. In pairs, students will correctly reorder these components and Angela and her
18011483 Violeta Zivanovic
partner will be asked to read out the narrative. I will ask the other students if they
have gotten the same or different structure and why it is or is not correct. I will then
write the structures (character and setting, complication, events that happened,
resolution and ending) on the whiteboard and have a prepared deck of cards that
state a character and setting. When students are selected, they need to select a
random card, which will provide them with the main character and setting of their
narrative. They will tell a story based on this information as they move under each
The text will be used as a model text to help Angela notice common text structure in
context before she attempts to reorder components that are out of context
(Hertzberg, 2012). Doing so will allow her to remember the names of these
share her and her partners structured narrative will encourage her to explain and
discuss her reasoning and will allow me to understand her thinking. This will enable
her to recycle the language regarding text structure with her partner before she orally
tells her story to the class. While telling her story, Angela is further recycling this
language and demonstrating her ability to tell a story with correct text structure
(Hertzberg, 2012). The strategy of providing students with a main character and
setting allows the student to concentration more on the structure itself and focus her
ideas. This activity prepares Angela to progress from a spoken mode, such as in this
text structure during the discussion and identification of the model texts structure in
18011483 Violeta Zivanovic
order to compare her knowledge at the end of the activity. I am able to formatively
assess her knowledge and understanding by observing the reordered text structure
pieces. When she shares her reasoning to the class, I am able to assess her
that she is aware of what she has done well and what she can improve. During her
story telling I will observe whether she has applied the feedback given to her earlier.
Furthermore, I will observe and assess if she has comprehended which text structure
component represent which part of the story. I will compare Angelas knowledge
from the beginning to the end of the activity and assess whether or not she is ready
area of concern that needs further development is character and setting, considering
her score of 2 out of 4 marks. The same text will be reused from the text structure
activity. As students will already be familiar with this text, they will concentrate more
I would read aloud Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963). After, I would write
down descriptions used to portray the characters and setting on the whiteboard.
Students will discuss whether they think it would be difficult to imagine Max and the
Wild Things characters by only reading the narrative and not looking at the pictures
(state that there is not enough detail in this story about how the characters feel, what
they are thinking and their actions). I would then discuss whether the narrative gives
the reader enough information about time, place and atmosphere without looking at
18011483 Violeta Zivanovic
character and setting. In groups, students will create and describe characters and a
setting with as much detail as possible, for the short orientation of a narrative. Each
group will need to act out the characters within the settings using the written
Hertzberg (2012) contends that when teaching writing skills, teachers need to shift
EAL/D students from spoken mode to written mode and this is reflected in the
activity. Angela will be involved in the verbal discussion, which will involve guided
support (Hertzberg, 2012). She will then help to deconstruction and brainstorm the
text in order to notice and recycle the different aspects necessary for creating and
maintaining these two components before writing her own. Moving to a written mode,
Angela and her group will be recasting by creating new characters and settings from
oral interactions that provide great detail (Hertzberg, 2012). Being an EAL/D learner,
she will benefit from group work, as she will be grouped with students that offer
English language models (Crawford, 2004). Dramatisation will help her to further
consolidate her learning for she will be able to create connections between the
written words and physical actions, emotions and expressions. Physically acting out
component in order to properly assess her writing skills and provide written feedback
18011483 Violeta Zivanovic
can see if she had applied feedback given to her earlier. The dramatisation enables
Conclusion
In essence, NAPLAN, a standardised assessment, ineffective and inaccurately
assesses the narrative writing skills of EAL/D learners. EAL/D student, Angelas
assessment data and research reveal that the limitations of NAPLAN surpass its
strengths for assessing writing skills of these students in classrooms that are
assessment, which enables the students and teacher to identify and work on
weaknesses and strengths and to recognise and address any problems immediately.
18011483 Violeta Zivanovic
References
Crawford, J. (2004). Educating English learners: Language diversity in the
Creagh, S. (2014). Naplan test data, ESL bandscales and the validity of
Sendak, M. (1963). Where the wild things are. New York: Harper & Row.
Spinelli, C.G. (2008). Addressing the issue of cultural and linguistic diversity